Love’s Madness, Fairy-Tale Enchantment, and a Sicilian...

• C H A P T E R O N E •

Love’s Madness, Fairy-Tale Enchantment, and a Sicilian Carnival

DIE HOCHZEIT, DIE FEEN, AND DAS LIEBESVERBOT

We must seize our chance and honestly seek to cultivate the

age’s new forms, and he will be its master who writes in

neither an Italian nor a French—nor even in a German—style.

—Richard Wagner, “German Opera” (1834)

In 1830 the seventeen-year-old Wagner first turned his hand to writing an opera,1

but beyond the fact that he described it as a “pastoral opera” and that it was modeledon Goethe’s pastoral play of 1768, Die Laune des Verliebten (The caprice of the in-fatuated lover), we know nothing about it, as he quickly abandoned the idea, and notext or music has survived. His next operatic venture (WWV 31) dates from the yearof Goethe’s death—1832—and on this occasion Wagner completed the libretto andmade a start on the score. Three numbers were set, and these have survived,2 butWagner later destroyed the libretto on the grounds that his sister Rosalie hated it.(This is entirely plausible, as Rosalie was then working as an actress at the RoyalSaxon Court Theater in Leipzig and was therefore in a position of some influence.Wagner evidently hoped for her support in this and other operatic ventures.) In his“Autobiographical Sketch” of 1843, he refers to it as an “operatic text of tragic im-port, although I no longer remember where I found the medieval subject” (GS 1:8).Later, in My Life (ML 75), he recounts the plot of the opera in some detail and statesthat he had first encountered it in Johann Gustav Gottlieb Büsching’s Ritterzeit undRitterwesen (The age of chivalry and nature of chivalry), a farrago of fact and fic-tion about the Middle Ages that had been published in Leipzig in 1823 and whoseimportance for Wagner cannot be overstated, for it was here that he found the seedsof ideas for all his operas based on medieval themes, up to and including Parsifal.(A copy of the volume also found its way into Wagner’s library in Bayreuth.)

Pre-echoes of Tristan und Isolde

A frenzied lover climbs up to the bedroom window of the fiancée of a friend of his,where she is waiting for her lover; she struggles with the madman and hurls him downinto the courtyard, where every bone in his body is broken. At his funeral, the fiancéeutters a cry and sinks lifeless upon his corpse. (GS 1:8–9)

Wagner was so attracted to this tale that he even thought of turning it into a shortstory in the style of E.T.A. Hoffmann. It is based in turn on a medieval verse nar-rative by an anonymous late-thirteenth-century German poet. (Its title, Frauentreue[Women’s fidelity], is not authentic but derives from an epilogue added by a laterpoet: “Das heizet vrouwen triuwe” [This is an example of women’s fidelity].) Theyoung Wagner knew this poem only at second hand, namely, from Büsching’sretelling of it, but by the time that he came to dictate My Life, he had already for-gotten it, so much so that he confused its plot with that of his own libretto. Onlymuch later did he get to know the original in Friedrich Heinrich von der Hagen’s1850 three-volume anthology, Gesammtabenteuer (Compendium of adventures).“In the evening,” we read in Cosima Wagner’s diary for 1 May 1873, “R. reads meFrauen Treue [sic] by Konrad von Würzburg, the original of his Hochzeit [Thewedding].” (Wagner was in error in attributing the poem to Konrad von Würzburg,who was in fact the author of the previous texts in Hagen’s collection.)3 It left a“wonderful impression” (CT, 1 May 1873). Wagner was clearly so fascinated bythe poem that he read it again eight years later. “We are very moved by its greatrespectability,” Cosima noted on 17 October 1881. “There is something almostpetit-bourgeois about it, in spite of all its boldness.” And she follows this up with aremark on the middle-class husband of the story, a comment that suddenly makesit clear what Wagner found so fascinating about this tale: “In the husband R. rec-ognizes his King Marke” (CT, 17 October 1881).

Büsching’s bombastically overwritten summary of the plot of the original thirteenth-century poem runs as follows:

A worthy warrior and knight, overbold in both body and spirit, had set his mind—asmany a God-fearing knight would do—on winning a woman’s favors by dint ofchivalry, which had cost him full many a gory wound. . . . In the course of his journey-ings in search of adventure, this knight came to a town. He did not know the peoplehere, with the exception of a single townsman whom he met here and who belonged tohis circle of acquaintances. The knight approached him, addressed him as an acquain-tance, and asked where he could find the most beautiful woman in the town.4

The townsman informs him that he will be able to see all the townswomen at theforthcoming service that is held each year to commemorate the consecration ofthe local church. And here the knight discovers a woman who robs him of hissenses: “Si kam im zuo der selben stunt / mitten in sînes herzen grunt, / darûz sinimmer mêr geschiet, / biz der tôt ez verschriet” [All at once she entered the verydepths of his heart, remaining there until death destroyed it].

The knight who arrives in town, becomes friendly with a member of the localburgher class, and falls in love with a middle-class woman at a church service—thereader is inevitably reminded of Die Meistersinger. In the case of Die Hochzeit,Wagner took up neither the motif of the meeting in church nor the social relationshipbetween the knight and his lover, but instead described her as a “lady of noblebirth” (ML 75). Neither she nor either of the two men is given a name: all are re-ferred to merely by their social status. Büsching goes on to explain how the knight

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pointed out this lady to the townsman who was accompanying him, and the townsmanrecognized her as his own wife. With a smile, he asked the knight to stay with him ashis guest, but the latter declined, so oppressed was his heart, and each day he wan-dered through the town, hoping for a glimpse of the woman he loved. He took lodg-ings close to her home, so that he could see her all the more often.5

It was not long before the woman noticed the lovesick knight and began to growwary, “wan si ze nieman liebe truoc, / wan z’ir êlichen man” [as she had neverloved anyone apart from her lawfully wedded husband]. At this point, Büschinginterrupts his summary of the plot, returning to it later and completing it at a to-tally unexpected point in his narrative. Wagner must have read Büsching’s workvery carefully for him to have been able to make sense of the story and recon-struct the overall context.

The knight organizes a tournament for the sake of the woman he loves, appear-ing at it wearing only a silk shirt.6 The point of an opponent’s spear becomes em-bedded in his side, and he will allow only this one woman to remove it: “Mich solnieman tuon gesunt, / wan durch der willen ich wart wunt, / læt mich diu susverderben, / sô wil ich gerne sterben” [No one shall cure me except the one forwhose sake I was wounded; if she leaves me thus to perish, I’ll gladly die]. Theidea of a knight being healed by the woman he loves is familiar, of course, fromthe exposition of Tristan und Isolde. Yet Büsching omits this very motif in hisretelling of the plot of Frauentreue.7

The woman is fully aware of the erotic nature of the knight’s request and so sheinitially refuses to draw the tip of the spear from his wound, and it is only in re-sponse to her husband’s earnest entreaties that, almost dying of shame, she agreesto do so. At this point, Büsching picks up the story again, offering only the briefestaccount of its tragic outcome.8 The knight has scarcely recovered when he entersthe couple’s bedroom at night and forces himself upon the wife. In keeping withmedieval custom, she was sleeping naked but manages to slip on a silk nightshirt.So violent is their struggle that the knight’s wound reopens, and, in a manner rem-iniscent of Wagner’s Tristan, he bleeds to death. Secretly she carries his body backto his lodgings, finally conscious of the greatness of his love for her: “Alrest diuvrouwe gedâhte, / der grôzen liebe ahte, / die der ritter zuo ir hâte: / dô was ez leidernû ze spâte” [Only now did the woman bethink herself and heed the great love thatthe knight felt for her: alas, it was now too late]. He is laid out in his coffin inchurch, whither the woman comes to offer a funerary sacrifice. Only her maidknows the secret of her love. (Again there is a striking parallel with Tristan undIsolde, this time with Brangäne.) Standing before the altar, she removes one articleof clothing after another—“si vergaz vor leide gar der scham” [in her grief sheeven forgot all sense of shame]—until she stands there in her shift, then sinks life-less upon the knight’s body in a kind of medieval Liebestod, or Love-death.9

The whole story is permeated with a series of subtle correspondences: at thebeginning the townswomen are placed on show, whereas at the end it is the knight’scorpse that is laid out on display; the first and last encounters between the knightand his lady take place in church; and there is the recurrent motif of the silk shirt

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or shift that the knight wears in fighting for his lover and that she in turn wears,first when defending herself in the bedroom and second when standing before hisbier. Both here and in the tournament the silk shirt or shift serves to symbolize anamorous relationship that flouts social etiquette. Just as the knight sacrifices hispersonal safety in the tournament, so the woman sacrifices her honor, hithertostaunchly upheld, in an exhibitionist act that was even more provocative in the caseof a middle-class woman than it would have been with a woman of noble birthand that is quite unprecedented in church. Thus she challenges the world, formallyexcluding herself from society with a finality that can end only with her death. Atale of such erotic eccentricity was conceivable only in the late Middle Ages. “Diuminne kan niht mâze hân” [Love cannot show moderation], we read in one of thepoems of Konrad von Würzburg,10 the thirteenth-century poet to whom Wagnerattributed Frauentreue. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of all this is that Wagner discovered this tale—it was virtually unknown in his own day but antici-pates many of the relationships of his later music dramas—hidden away amongthe chaff of Büsching’s rhapsodically rambling work.

The reader who is unfamiliar with the intricacies of medieval relationships andwho assumes the existence of an unambiguous ethical order in which marriage isinviolate will be surprised by the glorification of a love that overrides the ties ofmiddle-class marriage by demonstrating its allegiance to a higher code of ethicsinvolving knightly triuwe, or fidelity. This emerges not only from the prologue tothe poem, in which the anonymous poet praises the lovers’ reciprocal triuwe anddescribes the woman as “diu guote, / diu reine, wolgemuote” [good, pure, andwell disposed], but also, and more especially, from its ending, where even thehusband sings his wife’s praises when she dies for love of the knight: “ein wîp sôgar ân’ valschen list” [a wife so pure and lacking in falsehood]. (Such praise ispresumably possible, as the love between the knight and his lady stops short ofactual adultery, a point on which it differs from that of Tristan and Isolde.) Andthe tale ends with the common burial of the two lovers: “Dâ legte man siebeide / mit jâmer und mit leide / in ein grap, die holden. / Sus het si im ver-golden, / unt tet im ganze triuwe schîn” [Then with grief and anguish both werelaid in a single grave, the lovers. Thus she had requited him and given him proofof her steadfast fidelity].

It comes as no surprise to find that the older Wagner was fascinated by the linksbetween this tale of medieval love and his own Tristan und Isolde, even though hedid not explore many of their motivic correspondences in Die Hochzeit—indeed,he was unable to exploit them, as Büsching had passed over them in silence. In-stead, he introduced a number of new motifs that anticipate other themes in hislater works. The marriage between Ada and Arindal, for example, resembles thatbetween Isolde and King Marke in that both serve to bring peace and reconcilia-tion to two warring families or nations. In other words, Ada, the main femalecharacter, has evidently agreed to marry Arindal on rational grounds, which inturn explains the undeclared erotic fascination that Cadolt exercises over her.Cadolt later enters her bedroom, and, as Wagner explains in My Life, “his somberglance strikes her to the heart” (ML 75).



In spite of the differences between Die Hochzeit on the one hand and Frauentreueand Büsching’s résumé of its contents, on the other, there is no denying the simi-larity between the two subjects or their affinities with the relationship between thethree main characters in Tristan und Isolde—arguably another reason why Wagnerdescribed the libretto in such detail in My Life and why he repeatedly returned to itin the final years of his life. The idea of a love that not only destroys an existingmarriage but undermines social conventions; the refusal of one of the partners toacknowledge this love (in Die Hochzeit, it is Ada, whereas in Tristan und Isolde, itis Tristan); the “mysterious strength of these passionate but suppressed emotions”(ML 75) that then break out with all the greater force; and their fatal consequencein the form of a Liebestod and the death of the surviving partner: these are all un-mistakable motivic parallels between Die Hochzeit and Tristan und Isolde. Whenwe read in Wagner’s “Autobiographical Sketch” that the bride “sinks lifelesslyover the body” at the end (GS 1:9), we are bound to think of the end of Tristan undIsolde, where we likewise read in the stage directions that Isolde “sinks down onTristan’s body” (GS 7:81). As Bernd Zegowitz has explained in the context of DieHochzeit, “This sinking upon the body indicates two things. It is both a symbol ofAda’s unconsummated bridal night with Arindal and a substitute for their embracein the bedroom, an embrace that she herself interrupted. Their actual wedding thustakes place in death.”11

In My Life, Wagner describes Die Hochzeit as “an out-and-out night piece ofthe blackest hue,” claiming that it was inspired by E.T.A. Hoffmann and by the“musical mysticism” of which he was then so fond. “I executed this plan in blackon black, disdaining any ray of light and in particular any operatic embellishment,which would have been inappropriate here” (ML 75–76). Two ideas emerge fromthis statement, both of which were to be of immense importance for Wagner thelater music dramatist: first, his Romantic affinity with night, an affinity that was to leave its mark not only on his adaptation of Hoffmann’s Die Bergwerke zuFalun (The mines at Falun) ten years later but also on his great hymn to the night,Tristan und Isolde; and, second, his decision to dispense with elaborate operaticconventions.

Neither of these elements seems to have found favor with Wagner’s family, es-pecially his sister Rosalie, although their displeasure may also have been sparkedby the relationship between the three characters, a relationship abhorrent to theirsense of bourgeois morality. Wagner’s next operatic project was his self-styled“Romantic opera in three acts,” Die Feen (The fairies, WWV 32) of 1833–34, hisfirst completed work for the operatic stage. Although it, too, inhabits a world ofRomanticized medievalism, it could hardly be more different from Die Hochzeit inevery other respect. The “ray of light” that Wagner had spurned in Die Hochzeitand the “operatic embellishments” that he had formerly avoided as “inappropriate”are now back in force, enjoying a theatrical revival that has encouraged BerndZegowitz to speak of an outright “repudiation of Die Hochzeit”12 and of its super-session by bourgeois morality. The irreconcilability of marriage and physical lovethat Wagner had treated in Die Hochzeit is countered for the first and last time inhis works by the glorification of the family, a shift intended to please and pacify

his sister Rosalie. The fact that he again named his two main characters Ada andArindal merely highlights the contrast between the two works; as Egon Voss hassuggested, Wagner seems to have taken over the names unchanged “in order to rehabilitate the institution of marriage, which had come off so badly in DieHochzeit.”13

Ada and Arindal have been married for eight years, and their marriage has beenblessed with children. No other opera by Wagner was to adopt such an inviolateview of family life.14 In all his later works, children appear only as adolescent or-phans lacking one or both parents or they are the result of illicit unions. Mothersare either dead or passed over in silence (the only exceptions are Erda, who ap-pears as Brünnhilde’s mother in the Ring but has no contact with her daughter,and the mother of Isolde, who never appears onstage), whereas fathers are alwayswidowers, and marriages, invariably childless, are always unhappy or at least be-set by trouble and doomed to failure from the outset, assuming that they werecontracted in the first place. In short, Die Feen is the last of Wagner’s operas topresent a wholesome picture of family life. In the words in Opera and Drama (GS4:56), love is always seen as a “disruptive force,” undermining social institutionsand conventions. Only in Die Meistersinger is a fragile link forged between loveand social conventions.

As a paean to marriage, Die Feen is therefore a remarkable exception in Wagner’sworks—Egon Voss calls it “an opera for Wagner’s family,”15 and the note of ironyis unmistakable. There is a hidden reference to this in the second-act finale of theopera, at Ada’s words “O Himmel, schütz’ ihn, schütz’ ihn vor Verdacht” [Oheaven, protect him, protect him from suspicion] in bars 285–89, which quotefrom Wagner’s melodrama “Ach neige, du Schmerzenreiche” [Ah, look down,thou rich in sorrow’s crown], one of his Sieben Kompositionen zu Goethes Faust(Seven compositions for Goethe’s Faust, WWV 15) from 1831. This last-namedwork was evidently written for Rosalie, who at this time was playing Gretchen inGoethe’s play at the Leipzig Stadttheater.16 Wagner’s emphatic repudiation of DieFeen in later life—and from none of his early stage works did he distance himselfso radically17—is no doubt bound up with his feeling of unease that in an attemptto curry favor with his family, he had denied an essential part of his true nature asan artist and paid tribute to convention both formally and thematically, the veryconvention that he had mercilessly pilloried in Die Hochzeit.

In Search of Gozzi

In My Life, Wagner claims to have “written Die Hochzeit without operatic em-bellishments and to have treated the subject in the blackest possible vein,”whereas Die Feen is said to have been “decked out with a diversity that borderedon the intolerable.”

As for the poetic diction and the verses themselves, I was almost intentionally careless,as I was no longer entertaining my earlier hopes of making a name for myself as a poet.


I had become a “musician” and a “composer” and wanted to write a suitable “libretto,”as I now realized that no one else could do this for me, as a libretto is something uniqueand, as such, simply cannot be brought off by a poet or a man of letters. (ML 81)

The words that appear in quotation marks are evidently used ironically here; afterall, it was a fundamental principle of Wagner’s later reforms that the dualism ofwords and music in opera should be overcome and that the text should no longerbe merely a means to an end, and the “composer,” for his part, would become adramatist. In the “artwork of the future,” poetry and music were to be equallycommitted to fulfilling the “aim” of the drama. In Wagner’s eyes, Die Feen stillfell far short of this goal.

Here, too, the writings of E.T.A. Hoffmann were influential. Wagner was fa-miliar with Hoffmann’s narrative “Der Dichter und der Komponist” (The poet andthe composer) from his Serapionsbrüder (Serapion brethren) cycle. In this story,which takes the form of a dialogue between a poet and a composer, the imaginarycomposer advances the idea of a “musical drama” or “Romantic opera” in which“music emerges directly from the poem as a necessary product of it” and arguesthat the ten fairy-tale plays, or fiabe dramatiche, of Carlo Gozzi (1720–1806)would be ideal subjects for operas: “In his dramatic fairy tales he achieved every-thing that I demand of the operatic poet, and it is beyond belief that this rich veinof excellent subjects has not been tapped more often than it has been.”18

Wagner was to follow up this suggestion and launch his career as a musicdramatist with an adaptation of Gozzi’s La donna serpente (The serpent woman),which had received its first performance in Venice in 1762. In doing so, he usheredin a long series of Gozzi operas that was to continue until well into the twentiethcentury, with the Turandot operas of Busoni and Puccini, Prokofiev’s Love forThree Oranges, and Henze’s König Hirsch. Even before Wagner, La donna ser-pente had already been adapted for the stage by Friedrich Heinrich Himmel,whose Zauberoper (magic opera) Die Sylphen (The sylphs) was staged in Berlinin 1806. In the twentieth century it provided the basis for Alfredo Casella’s Ladonna serpente, first heard in Rome in 1932. And Gozzi himself was the maincharacter in Die Familie Gozzi (The family Gozzi), an opera written in 1934 bythe pianist Wilhelm Kempff. Nor should we forget Hofmannsthal and Strauss’sDie Frau ohne Schatten (The woman without a shadow), which, although not di-rectly based on Gozzi, takes over a number of motifs and names as well as thegeneral oriental atmosphere of the Italian playwright’s fiabe dramatiche.

Gozzi has gone down in the history of the theater as an exponent of the Italianimprovised comedy, or commedia dell’arte, a genre that he both defended and re-formed. By this date in its history, the commedia dell’arte had become ossified as aresult of the constant repetition of the same stock situations. Gozzi’s hated archrival,Carlo Goldoni, attempted to remedy this problem by turning the commedia dell’arteinto a more sophisticated form of comedy involving realistic characters and a fixedtext, whereas Gozzi himself sought to preserve its original spirit of improvisationand to breathe new life into it by introducing fantastical, fairy-tale elements, draw-ing on themes and motifs from the Arabian Nights and from an anthology of fairy


tales by Giambattista Basile known as the Cunto de li cunti (1634–36). AlthoughGozzi’s fiabe dramatiche generally rely on fixed texts, the scenes involving comme-dia dell’arte characters are merely sketched out in the manner of a scenario, leavingthe actors greater or lesser scope for improvisation. These fairy-tale comedies wereinitially immensely successful, so much so, in fact, that Goldoni was driven fromVenice and forced to settle in Paris. But in Italy, audiences soon tired of them, withthe result that they eventually fell into neglect, whereas in Germany they flourishedand proved hugely influential thanks to Schiller’s adaptation of Turandot and, aboveall, to the enthusiastic response of the Romantics, who even compared Gozzi withShakespeare. Presumably it was Wagner’s scholarly uncle and mentor, Adolf Wagner,who drew his nephew’s attention to Gozzi. Adolf had known both Hoffmann andTieck personally, had corresponded with Jean Paul, and in his youth had evenknown Schiller. In 1804 he translated Il corvo as Der Rabe (The raven), and in hisessay Theater und Publikum (Theater and public, 1823) he singled out Gozzi forspecial mention, praising him as a writer who had raised comedy from the depthsinto which it had sunk at the hands of the bourgeois realists of the Enlightenmentand rescued it “from ordinariness and triviality” by restoring it “to the world of thelighthearted imagination.”

It is clear from Cosima’s diaries that Wagner never lost his enthusiasm forGozzi. On 13 October 1872, for example, he explicitly aligned himself with Gozziin the latter’s rivalry with Goldoni, although he was wrong to claim that unlikeGoldoni, Gozzi “felt the common people’s instinctive hostility to dabbling in lit-erature.” Rather, the opposite was the case, with the aristocratic Gozzi regardingthe rabble with unfeigned contempt, whereas Goldoni had sought to invest hislower-class characters with a greater degree of individuality.

In his “Letter to an Actor on Acting” (1872), Wagner commended Gozzi forrehabilitating improvisation in his fiabe dramatiche. In his adaptation of La donnaserpente, of course, he had no choice but to cut the improvised scenes or writethem out in full—no other alternative was possible in an opera. The masks of thecommedia dell’arte tradition are replaced by other, more or less comic characterswho, in keeping with Wagner’s decision to transfer the action from Gozzi’s semi-oriental, semi-Venetian fairy-tale world of masks to a Nordic realm, now sport suchincongruous names as Gunther and Gernot, with the heroes of the Nibelungenliedreduced to the point where they have become comic servants. The name Arindal,which Wagner had already used for the male protagonist in Die Hochzeit, wastaken over from Ossian—Wagner may have found it in Goethe’s Werther, whereit also occurs. The typically Gozzian tendency for the tragic and the sublime to beinfiltrated by comic elements and the predominance of the grotesque that sofascinated the Romantics are two aspects of the original that are much reduced inWagner’s libretto, even though here, too, the alternation between tragic and comicscenes has been preserved in essence.

In general, Wagner has taken over intact the plot of Gozzi’s tragicomedy, themain difference being the change of imagery surrounding Ada’s transformation, achange of which Wagner was particularly proud, as he explained in A Communi-cation to My Friends (1851): “A fairy who renounces her immortality in order to


gain possession of the man she loves can win mortality only by meeting certainstrict conditions. If she fails to meet them, her mortal lover is threatened with theharshest of fates” (GS 4:252–53). But the ordeal—I will return to the conditionsbound up with it—proves too much for her lover. Whereas in Gozzi the fairy isnow turned into a snake (only her lover’s kiss can turn her back again), Wagner al-tered the ending in such a way that “the spell on the fairy, who has been turned tostone, can be broken only by her lover’s impassioned singing” (GS 4:253).

The motif whereby a human being is turned to stone or becomes a statue has a long and venerable tradition in myth, recurring most recently in ChristophRansmayr’s Ovid-inspired novel Die letzte Welt (1988)—in 1990 an Englishtranslation appeared under the title The Last World—within the framework of apostmodern take on the Metamorphoses in which the character of Battus is quiteliterally petrified. The reader will also be reminded in this context of Lot’s wife,who is turned to a pillar of salt in the Bible, and of the Greek Niobe, who turns tostone in her grief at her children’s murder. The motif is found in myths and fairytales throughout the world, as is its counterpart whereby the statue is restored tolife. Unsurprisingly, it also occurs repeatedly in Gozzi, most notably in Il corvo, apiece of which Wagner thought very highly and whose contents are summarized indetail in Hoffmann’s “Der Dichter und der Komponist” (The poet and the com-poser). And it is found, too, in Gozzi’s L’augelin belverde (The green bird), inwhich one after another of the characters is turned into a statue and back again. Inshort, Wagner replaced one motif from Gozzi with another. But the way in whichhe interpreted it derives from elsewhere, for the idea of a statue coming back tolife through music is strikingly reminiscent of the end of Shakespeare’s Winter’sTale, which Wagner undoubtedly knew. Here the apparent statue of Leontes’ wife,Hermione—it is, in fact, Hermione herself—is restored to her original human formto the sound of music. This idea of a statue coming to life is associated above allwith the classical myth of Pygmalion, the sculptor who fell in love with the statuethat he had made, so that Venus breathed life into it for him. By the eighteenthcentury this motif had come to symbolize the very existence of the artist who bydint of his creative fire breathes life into what was dead and artificial. Two strophesfrom Schiller’s poem “Die Ideale” (1795) illustrate this idea:

Wie einst mit flehendem VerlangenPygmalion den Stein umschloß,Bis in des Marmors kalte WangenEmpfindung glühend sich ergoß,So schlang ich mich mit LiebesarmenUm die Natur, mit Jugendlust,Bis sie zu athmen, zu erwarmenBegann an meiner Dichterbrust,

Und, theilend meine Flammentriebe,Die Stumme eine Sprache fand,Mir wiedergab den Kuß der LiebeUnd meines Herzens Klang verstand;


Da lebte mir der Baum, die Rose,Mir sang der Quellen Silberfall,Es fühlte selbst das SeelenloseVon meines Lebens Widerhall.

[As once Pygmalion, fondly yearning,Embrac’d the statue form’d by him,

Till the cold marble’s cheeks were burning,And life diffus’d through ev’ry limb—

So I, with youthful passion fired,My longing arms round Nature threw,

Till, clinging to my breast inspired,She ’gan to breathe, to kindle, too.

And all my fiery ardour proving,Though mute, her tale she soon could tell,

Return’d each kiss I gave her loving,The throbbings of my heart read well.

Then living seem’d each tree, each flower,Then sweetly sang the waterfall,

And e’en the soulless in that hourShar’d in the heav’nly bliss of all.

(Trans. Edgar Alfred Bowring)]

The ideas that Wagner found in Gozzi were combined with others drawn fromThe Winter’s Tale and from the myths of Pygmalion and Orpheus, who not onlytamed wild beasts with his singing but caused the very stones and trees to move,thus producing a potent mix of symbols in which Arindal becomes an artist whothrough the power of music breaks the spell on his lover, who has been turned intoa stone statue. (Musically and dramatically, the model for this scene is Hades inGluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice, where Orpheus’s singing and playing melt the heartsof the unfeeling Furies.)

Ja, ich besitze Götterkraft!Ich kenne ja der holden Töne Macht,Der Gottheit, die der Sterbliche besitzt!Du, heiße Liebe, Sehnsucht und Verlangen,Entzaubert denn in Tönen diesen Stein!

(SS 11:56–57)

[Yes, godly strength I own!I know sweet music’s power,The godhead that the mortal owns!O fiery love, desire and longing,Uncharm this stone through music’s tones!]

Two of the themes found here—the idea of a creature from the spirit world whoyearns to become human and who is prepared to forgo his or her immortality for

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the sake of human love, and the tragic clash between the spirit and human worlds—are central to many Romantic operas of the first half of the nineteenth century, be-ginning in 1816 with Hoffmann’s Undine and culminating in 1850 with Wagner’sLohengrin. Heinrich Marschner’s two operas Der Vampyr (1828) and Hans Heil-ing (1833) are part of the same tradition.

The idea of testing the love of a human being who enters into a relationship witha figure from the spirit world and who is required to obey an almost impossible in-junction is common to three of Wagner’s Romantic operas, Die Feen, Der fliegendeHolländer, and Lohengrin. In Die Feen and Lohengrin the test involves not askinga question: the human partner is not allowed to fathom the mystery surrounding theotherworldly being who has entered his or her world. This, too, was a classical motif,as Wagner was fully aware (GS 4:289); suffice it to mention Zeus and Semele, andAmor and Psyche. The motif recurs, at least peripherally, in Wagner’s unfinishedsketch for Wieland der Schmied (Wieland the Smith, 1849–50), where it is said thatthe Prince of the Light Elves approached Schwanhilde’s mother in the form of aswan, much as Zeus approached Leda. They lived together for three years until “themother, in her foolish eagerness, desired to know who her husband was, a questionthat she had been told not to ask. Then the Prince of the Elves swam away throughthe waves in the form of a swan” (GS 3:182). Here motifs from the myths of Leda,Semele, and Psyche have merged with others from Lohengrin.

In Gozzi’s La donna serpente, Farruscad violates a similar injunction by search-ing his wife’s boudoir, and in Die Feen, Arindal—anticipating Elsa in Lohengrin—urges his lover “to tell him who she is and whence she comes” (SS 11:9). Accordingto My Life, Ada has to impose the harshest ordeals on her human lover (the ban onquestions is only one such test of his love), for “only by triumphing over them canhe free her from the fairies’ immortal world and allow her, as a loving wife, to sharein the fate of all mortals” (ML 80). This motif is strikingly reminiscent not only ofUndine but also of a twentieth-century opera to which I have already referred, DieFrau ohne Schatten.19 Hofmannsthal is known to have studied Wagner’s musicdramas in detail while working on his libretto, and there is no doubt that Die Feenprovided him with a number of ideas, even if the many parallels between the twoworks—the fact that the Empress, whose father is from the spirit world, originallyassumes the form of an animal caught by the mortal huntsman who is later to be-come her husband; the idea of an ordeal; and the transformation into a statue—canalso be explained by reference to the fact that both librettists were drawing onGozzi. Strauss, too, was familiar with Die Feen, as he helped to prepare the work’sfirst performance in Munich in 1888. (To his annoyance, the premiere was en-trusted instead to his superior, Franz Fischer.) The production remained in theMunich repertory for many years, and in 1895 Strauss’s wife, Pauline de Ahna,took the part of Ada.

A comparison between Die Feen and Gozzi’s La donna serpente reveals the extent to which Wagner refashioned many of the situations that he found in hissource, aligning them with the spirit of the great poetic and musical impressions ofhis youth. Shakespeare’s influence is evident not only in the parallel with the finalscene of The Winter’s Tale but also in a number of reminiscences of A Midsummer

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Night’s Dream, and Arindal’s mad scene in act 2, for which there is no direct par-allel in Gozzi, recalls King Lear, a work that had already inspired Wagner’s firstwork for the theater, the tragedy Leubald WWV 1 (see also ML 32). Mad sceneswere of course a regular feature of nineteenth-century operas, most notablyMasaniello’s in Auber’s La muette de Portici (The mute girl of Portici), a work thatplayed a paradigmatic role in the young Wagner’s life. In much the same way, Weber’s Oberon has left its mark on the action in many small ways, both musicallyand poetically, including the appearance of the King of the Fairies at the end. Theordeal scene in the final act, with its Chorus of Men of Bronze, and the earlier “pu-rification” of the children of Ada and Arindal by what they think is death by fire(see SS 11:40–45) are clearly modeled on the penultimate trial undergone byTamino and Pamina in Die Zauberflöte (The magic flute). The last-named workhas left its mark on Die Feen in other ways, too, with the scene between Drolla andGernot in act 2 evidently inspired by the duet between Papageno and Papagena;other aspects of the scene can be traced back to Pedrillo and Blonde in Die Ent-führung aus dem Serail (The abduction from the seraglio) and to Sherasmin andFatima in Oberon. Even more important are the influences to which Wagner him-self admitted: Beethoven (Ada’s great scena and aria in act 2 is clearly based onLeonore’s “Abscheulicher”) and, above all, Weber and Marschner, whose Roman-tic operas inspired the words and music of Die Feen.20

Pre-echoes of the Later Wagner

For all that Die Feen contains many reminiscences of Wagner’s musical models, itgoes far beyond the mere imitation of well-tried devices, not least as a result of itsdramatic intensity, an intensity that has persuaded one commentator to write of“an impassioned young man with the strength of a wild animal mobilizing all theresources of the Romantic music theater.”21 And, like Wagner’s next opera, DasLiebesverbot (The ban on love), it also contains many presentiments, not to saypre-echoes, of his later works. The rising semiquaver figure in the introduction tothe overture, for example, points the way ahead to what is arguably Wagner’smost important purely instrumental work, his Faust Overture. And the unaccom-panied preghiera (prayer) at the start of act 3 recalls the prayer before the singlecombat between Lohengrin and Telramund in act 1 of Lohengrin (in this case themodel is almost certainly the unaccompanied prière in act 3 of La muette de Por-tici). Even Wagner’s later use of the leitmotif for psychological ends is alreadyadumbrated here, notably in the theme of Gernot’s Romance about the witch Dilnovaz, which Gernot sings in an attempt to persuade Arindal to abandon Adaon the grounds that she, too, is no more than a sorceress. This theme returns in act2 at the very moment when Arindal himself begins to doubt Ada as a result of theterrible trials that he thinks she has inflicted on him. Or take the braying horn callsat the beginning of Arindal’s mad scene, a passage intended to imitate the soundof barking dogs and one that clearly anticipates Sieglinde’s hallucinatory visionof a pack of snarling hounds in act 2 of Die Walküre.

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According to Paul Bekker, “the youthful composer had suddenly struck down tothe foundation of his own genius” in this scene.22 And, as Werner Breig has pointedout, it is significant that Wagner’s music gains in its “power of expression and orig-inality in scenes where the border states of consciousness are characterized in musi-cal terms.”23 Among these scenes are some that are almost Kleistian in their abilityto merge dreams and reality, notably in Ada’s first appearance before Arindal in act1 (SS 11:19–20). Wagner’s interest in “border states of consciousness” is alreadyclear from Leubald, which he wrote when he was only fourteen and whose titularhero spends long periods in a state of mental confusion. Wagner claimed that it wasin order to set Leubald that he learned how to write music (ML 38), although itseems unlikely that he had anything more in mind than incidental music in the styleof Beethoven’s music for Goethe’s Egmont. “I am no composer,” he told Cosima on31 January 1870. “I wanted to learn enough only to compose Leubald und Adelaide[sic]; and that is how things have remained—only the subjects have changed.”

Far more important than these occasional pre-echoes of the music of Wagner’slater works are the ways in which themes and characters and their interrelation-ships are prefigured in Die Feen. No matter how much Wagner may have changedartistically and ideologically, certain prototypical scenes remain pivotal to his plotsfrom his very first opera through to his last. A classic example of this is what wemight call “the poetics of the glance”24—to borrow a term from Jean Starobinski’sfamous chapter on Racine.25 In his mad scene, Arindal remembers pursuing thehind and how, struck down by his arrow, it had revealed itself as the fairy Ada.

O seht, das Tier kann weinen!Die Träne glänzt in seinem Aug’!O, wie’s gebrochen nach mir schaut!

(SS 11:48)

[Behold, the beast can weep!A teardrop glistens in its eye!Oh, how dulled it gazes up at me!]

This image of the animal’s dying glance directed at the huntsman is bound to re-mind the reader of the moment when Gurnemanz directs Parsifal’s gaze at theswan that he has killed: “Gebrochen das Aug’, siehst du den Blick?” [Its eye isdulled, do you see its glance?] (GS 10:335) At this point Parsifal feels the first stir-rings of pity and breaks his bow. (Not until later does he acquire the maturity andexperience to fathom the full depths of human suffering through the agony thatAmfortas feels.) Thus, in Wagner’s mind the glance was associated with pity andcompassion. Here it is worth mentioning an episode from Wagner’s own life, anepisode, moreover, that occurred while he was working on Die Feen. During histime in Würzburg, Wagner frequented a local beer garden known as Der letzteHieb (the place still exists), and on one occasion he became involved in a fight witha fellow reveler to whom he had taken a dislike. Wagner struck his opponentroundly on the skull “and caught the bewildered look he gave me.” The man’s gazetraumatized him, leaving him with an abiding sense of guilt and a loathing of all

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forms of physical violence. In this context he describes how, even in his adoles-cence, he could already “empathize with the sufferings of others, especially withthose of animals” (ML 83–84).

The hind’s dying glance wakens Arindal’s love of Ada. This too is a prototypicalscene in Wagner’s works. Think of the moment when Isolde recalls how she oncestood before Tristan, sword in hand, and how he gazed up at her from his sickbed.

Von seinem Betteblickt’ er her,—nicht auf das Schwert,nicht auf die Hand,—

er sah mir in die Augen.(GS 7:11)

[From his bedhe looked up,—not at the sword,not at my hand,—

he looked into my eyes.]

The sense of compassion kindled by this glance prevents Isolde from exacting re-venge. The glance of the victim stirs a glance of compassion that turns to an ex-pression of love. That compassion and love are always synonymous in Wagner’sworks is clear from the look of suffering in the eyes of the portrait of the FlyingDutchman in Daland’s house, a look that arouses Senta’s compassion and love.“Kann meinem Blick Theilnahme ich verwehren?” she asks Erik [Can I preventmy gaze from feeling sympathy?] (GS 1:275). But Erik is right to suspect thatSenta’s gaze expresses more than mere sympathy.

Another typical motif that links Die Feen with Der fliegende Holländer,Tannhäuser, Lohengrin, and Die Walküre can be described, in Thomas Mann’swords, as “sympathy with death,” albeit not yet in the sense understood by the décadents. Like Lohengrin, Ada hails from a timeless world, a “paradis artificiel,”and, like Lohengrin, she is prepared to renounce this world and her immortality forthe sake of love. As I have already noted, a condition is attached to this decision, inthat Arindal and Elsa are famously banned from asking about the origins and na-ture of their otherworldly partner for a certain period of time. Neither has thestrength to stick to this condition. Lohengrin, in Wagner’s words, “admits to his divine origins and returns, annihilated, to his lonely state” (GS 4:296). Here, para-doxically, the character’s return to a timeless state from one of temporality signi-fies “annihilation.” Arindal, by contrast, is banished from the fairy-land paradiseand transported to a “desolate rocky landscape” (SS 11:10). The speed with whichthis change takes place inevitably recalls the way in which Tannhäuser is suddenlytransported from the Venusberg to the valley at the foot of the Wartburg. Althoughboth the Venusberg and the fairy land are different worlds, there is a sense inwhich, being beyond time, they are also beyond space, which explains how thefairy world into which Arindal had stumbled while out hunting can penetrate the

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human world in the second half of act 1 as suddenly as the Venusberg erupts intothe valley of the Wartburg in act 3 of Tannhäuser.

Like Lohengrin, Ada remains behind, annihilated, in her lonely paradise: “Zutraurig hartem Lose / wird mir Unsterblichkeit” [Immortality is now my grievousfate] (SS 11:19–20). And there is the same paradox as before: for Ada, immortal-ity means “being dead forever” (SS 11:20). But Arindal is given a further chanceto win back Ada by means of a new ordeal, an opportunity not found in Lohengrin.In act 2, the two fairies Zemina and Farzana offer Ada a choice between the time-less fairy realm and the world of human mortality: “Hier langer Tod und dort einewig Leben” [Here lengthy death and there eternal life] (SS 11:35). But for Ada,this set of values no longer applies; for her, immortality betokens a “lengthydeath,” whereas mortality is the equivalent of “eternal life.”

Ich könnte allem mich entzieh’n,steht mir’s nicht frei? In ew’ger Schöneunsterblich, unverwelklich blüh’n!Es huldigt mir die Feenwelt,ich bin ihr Glanz und ihre Zier,es ehrt ein unvergänglich Reichmich, seine hohe Königin!Ich könnte allem mich entzieh’n,in Feenpracht unsterblich blüh’n!Betrogen, Unglücksel’ge!Was ist dir Unsterblichkeit?Ein grenzenloser, ew’ger Tod,doch jeder Tag bei ihmein neues, ewiges Leben!

(SS 11:36)

[I could withdraw from all of this,Am I not free to do so? In endless beautyI would bloom, immortal and unfading!To me the fairy realm pays tribute,I lend it sheen and luster,A realm, imperishable, honorsMe, its high-born queen!I could withdraw from all of thisAnd flourish in undying fairy splendor!Deceived, unhappy woman!Of what avail is immortality to you?A boundless, endless death,Yet every day with himIs new, eternal life.]

In much the same way, Tannhäuser yearns to escape from Venus’s timeless realmand rediscover temporality and mortality.

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Wenn stets ein Gott genießen kann,bin ich dem Wechsel unterthan;nicht Lust allein liegt mir am Herzen,aus Freuden sehn’ ich mich nach Schmerzen.

(GS 2:6)

[A god may know eternal joy,But, human, I am bound to change;My heart is set on more than mere delight:For in the midst of joy I long for pain.]

“O, Göttin,” he goes on, “woll’ es fassen, / mich drängt es hin zum Tod!” [Oh, god-dess, try to understand, it’s death for which I crave!] (GS 2:11). It is not immortalitythat confers life on him, but mortality, with the result that he is alarmed whenVenus threatens him with the same fate as Ahasuerus and the Flying Dutchman:“Wenn selbst der Tod dich meidet, / ein Grab dir selbst verwehrt” [When death it-self avoids you, the grave is closed to you] (GS 2:11).

Siegmund, too, rejects Brünnhilde’s offer of “eternal bliss,” dismissing suchjoys as “hollow” (GS 6:53). Instead, he prefers a life of suffering at Sieglinde’sside, and his decision leaves the Valkyrie so shaken that she ceases to be the “un-feeling maid” that Siegmund takes her to be (GS 6:53). Abandoning the world oftimeless, painless divinity, Brünnhilde violates Wotan’s decree out of her sense ofsolidarity with the suffering human couple before her and in that way becomeshuman and mortal in turn.

The fairies in Wagner’s first opera are likewise “unfeeling maids,” insensitivemembers of a world that knows neither mortality nor the experience of emotion andsuffering bound up with it. Just as Brünnhilde abandons the Valkyries, so Ada, bybecoming a sentient human being, leaves behind the unfeeling fairy band. Likethe Nurse in Die Frau ohne Schatten, Zemina and Farzana embody the lack ofcompassion of the fairy world and stake everything on the belief that Arindal willfail the tests imposed on him and that Ada will in consequence return to their ownimmortal world. (The eponymous heroine of Die Frau ohne Schatten is in manyways related to Brünnhilde: she too is moved by her sense of solidarity with suf-fering humanity to abandon the shadowless, timeless, and emotionless spiritworld that she had once inhabited.)

In the case of Die Feen, immortality has the last word, thereby asserting a prior-ity that is puzzling and at odds with Wagner’s “sympathy with death.” As such, thishighlights the change in Wagner’s thinking since Die Hochzeit. Whereas Farruscadand Cherestani share a human fate in Gozzi’s La donna serpente, Ada and Arindalare removed from this “earthly dust” (SS 11:58) and welcomed into a world ofimmortality. This change makes sense only against the background of the myth ofthe artist that derives from the Orpheus legend and transfigures the end of the opera:through his singing and playing, Arindal has broken the spell on the stone statue ofAda, an artistic feat by dint of which he becomes “more than a man—immortal”(SS 11:57). By being transported to the fairy world, he undergoes the sort ofapotheosis that is typically associated with the artist.

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From Die Feen to Das Liebesverbot

Die Feen was the only one of Wagner’s thirteen completed operas not to be per-formed during his lifetime. He had already finished the libretto by the time he tookup his first professional engagement as chorus master in Würzburg in January1833. The post had been obtained for him by his brother Albert, who was alreadyworking at the theater as a singer and stage manager. On his way to taking up hisnew post, Wagner broke his journey in Bamberg and, according to his later accountin My Life, “recalled E.T.A. Hoffmann’s stay in the town and the genesis of hisFantasiestücke [Fantasy pieces]” (ML 81), a comment that indicates the extent towhich Wagner was still in thrall to Romantic poetry at this time. He worked on thescore of Die Feen throughout the twelve months that he spent in Würzburg, com-pleting it on 6 January 1834 and possibly even arranging a concert performanceof excerpts from it.

Wagner returned to his native Leipzig in January 1834 and for a time hoped thatthe local theater would stage his first completed opera, but the promised productionwas repeatedly postponed, and finally it was abandoned altogether. During his ne-gotiations with the theater, Wagner was persuaded to provide the work with spokendialogue in the style of an opéra comique,26 although these passages of dialogue arelimited to the comic scenes, in other words, to the ones that were largely improvisedin Gozzi’s original. Here Wagner followed his source far more closely than in thesung recitatives, thereby giving much greater scope to low comedy and parody.

In the event, Die Feen reached the stage neither in this nor in any other form atthis time, a state of affairs that was due first and foremost to the fact that, accordingto My Life, Wagner had already lost interest in the work soon after completing thescore: “The very act of starting on the composition of Das Liebesverbot put me in aframe of mind in which I soon lost interest in the older work” (ML 104).27 This newframe of mind found unambiguous expression in Wagner’s earliest writings from1834, namely, in the essays “German Opera” and “Pasticcio by Canto Spianato.”Although the authorship of the second article admittedly remains contentious,both attest to a sudden turning away from German Romantic opera or, as Wagnerwould later express it, his lapse into the shallow world of French and Italian operaof the most “frivolous” and “fashionable” kind (GS 4:256). Now he contemptu-ously dismisses his earlier model Weber, reserving his greatest scorn for the veryopera to which he had previously owed so much and on which he was later todraw for inspiration: Euryanthe.

Wagner’s aesthetic volte-face was closely connected with his conversion to theYoung German movement of the 1830s, a movement whose leading spokesman,Heinrich Laube, had been a personal acquaintance of his for some time. Indeed, itwas in Laube’s Zeitung für die elegante Welt (Journal for polite society) that Wagner’s first piece of journalism, “German Opera,” was published on 10 June1834. Wagner ends this article with the words “We must seize our chance andhonestly seek to cultivate the age’s new forms” (SS 12:4), meaning that he was nowresolved to turn his back on the escapism and mysticism that he had glorified in

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Die Feen, notably in the way in which Ada and Arindal are spirited away to fairy-land at the end of the opera. This flight from the present was to be replaced by anactive engagement with the here and now and, more especially, by a glorificationof sensuality. In this spirit Wagner conceived Das Liebesverbot in 1834, complet-ing its libretto later that year, only months after putting the finishing touches to thescore of Die Feen. If readers were to compare the themes of his first two operas,Wagner wrote in 1851 in his Communication to My Friends, they would see that

there existed within me the potential for developing in one or other of two fundamentallydifferent directions: the utter seriousness of my basic nature was now contrasted with amischievous propensity for wild and sensuous abandon and rebellious pleasure thatseemed to be in the starkest possible contrast to it. This contrast becomes particularlyclear when I compare the music of these two operas. . . . Anyone who was to comparethe music of my later opera with that of Die Feen would find it hard to believe that sostriking a change of direction could have taken place in so short a time. (GS 4:255–56)

Wagner was guilty of a certain exaggeration here; just as there are occasional tracesin Die Feen of the influence of Italian opera, especially Rossini, so the composer ofDas Liebesverbot—unlike the author of the dismissive article “German Opera”—was far from denying the influence of Weber or Beethoven in a number of scenes inthe work. (In the case of Beethoven, there are even thematic parallels between DasLiebesverbot and Fidelio: the second acts of both operas begin with a dungeonscene, with the prisoner then rescued by a woman and the opera ending with a deusex machina that brings to an end the tyrant’s despotic rule.)28 And there are also musical and literary links between Das Liebesverbot and Tannhäuser, the moststriking of them being the Dresden Amen that is pre-echoed in the “Salve Regina”in act 1, scene 2 of Das Liebesverbot. I shall have more to say about the literaryreminiscences in my chapter on Tannhäuser. Here it is sufficient to recall Isabella’sexclamation in the opening act of Das Liebesverbot: “O, wie so öde das Lebenbliebe, / gab er [Gott] nicht Liebe und Liebeslust” [Oh, how barren life would be ifGod had not given us love and love’s pleasure] (SS 11:84). Her words are an almostliteral anticipation of Venus’s great cry in Tannhäuser:

Ach! kehrtest du nicht wieder,dann träfe Fluch die Welt;für ewig läg’ sie öde,aus der die Göttin schwand!

(GS 2:10)

[Ah! if you were not to return,a curse would blight the world;forever it would then lie barrenwhen forsaken by the goddess!]

But the most striking link between Wagner’s first attempt at a German Romanticopera and its “frivolously Italianate” successor is the fact that both derive at least

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part of their inspiration from the commedia dell’arte tradition. In the case of DasLiebesverbot, this finds its most salient expression in the burlesque episodes suchas the trial scene involving Brighella (whose very name recalls the commedia del-l’arte style), Pontio, and Dorella in act 1, where the Italian tradition is far morepalpable than in Die Feen.

Although Wagner later returned to the German Romantic tradition in Derfliegende Holländer and came to regard as an aberration his enthusiasm not onlyfor French and Italian operas but also for the world of ideas associated with theYoung German movement, he consistently refused—for the reasons suggestedhere—to agree to a production of Die Feen or even to the publication of the workduring his lifetime. But although he excluded it from his collected writings, he re-galed his friends with a reading of excerpts from it one year before his death.

Not until 1888, two years after the death of King Ludwig II, to whom Wagnerhad donated the full score of the opera in 1865, did Die Feen receive its first per-formance at the Court Theater in Munich, a performance that took place againstthe wishes of Cosima Wagner; but since she did not own the performing rights toher late husband’s first two operas, her claim that Wagner had never wanted thework to be staged fell on deaf ears. The production was directed by Karl Brulliot,“with scenic arrangements, stage machinery, and lighting” by Karl Lautenschläger,and was a spectacular success, not least as a result of its unparalleled extravagance,remaining in the repertory until 1899. According to Theodor Helm’s review of thefirst performance,

the final apotheosis was the most beautiful and magical sight that we have ever seenin this genre, indeed, it is impossible to describe the enchanting effect of the sculp-tural groups rising up to dizzying heights, the fantastical calyxes, seashells, and gem-stone crystals opening up on every side, and, finally, the electric lighting that was usedon such a massive scale.29

A second production was mounted at the Prinzregententheater in 1910, conductedby Felix Mottl and performed as part of the Munich Festival, but on this occasionthe work was a resounding failure. Of the handful of subsequent productions, it issufficient to mention only the two most notable ones: in 1981, at the WuppertalOpera, Friedrich Meyer-Oertel staged the work from an ironic perspective, seeingthe Romantic fairy-tale world as an oneiric product of the nineteenth century, res-onating with allusions to the real life of the times. As such, the opera was seen asthe projection of a society that sought refuge from life’s demands in a world ofempty illusion.30 In this way, the anti-Romantic stance that Wagner temporarilyadopted under the influence of the Young German movement was projected backonto his first completed opera, with Romantic opera called into question by meansof its own conventions. Meyer-Oertel restaged Die Feen at Munich’s Theater amGärtnerplatz in 1989, and on this occasion he adopted a different approach to thepiece, turning it into what the German music critic Karl Schumann described as a“kind of delirium on the part of a Romantic Zauberoper.”31 The postmodern setsand costumes by Dieter Flimm and Maria Lucas combined fairy tale and reality,

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history and myth, in a virtuoso and often puzzling game of associations in whichtime and place were forever shifting. The fairy realm was a hermetically sealedworld of women that rejected the importunate Arindal. Certain elements evoked theRomantic grotesquerie of E.T.A. Hoffmann, and others recalled a modern nightclub,with choreography by Ursula Linke based on the style of modern Ausdruckstanz(expressive dance). Arindal was part Orpheus and part Ludwig II, finally triumphingover the celestially cold world of womenkind and finding himself transported to thestarry vault above. The opera, in short, was interpreted as an exploration of the ide-ology underpinning much of nineteenth-century art.

Bel Canto Opera as an Erotic Utopia

In “German Opera” (1834), his first theoretical essay, Wagner stressed the “infiniteadvantage” that the Italians enjoyed over the Germans in bel canto opera—thevoice-dominated opera that in Wagner’s view was then the only type of operaworthy of the name. He was “heartily sick of the endlessly allegorizing orchestralturmoil,” a complaint that sounds very similar to the anti-Wagnerian attacks thatwere later to be leveled at the symphonic use of the orchestra in the Wagnerianmusic drama. Rather, he yearned for “simple, noble singing” and decried “thiswretched erudition—the source of every German ill” (SS 12:1–2). Dieter Rexrothhas suggested, with some plausibility, that the musical theme that Wagner uses tosymbolize Friedrich’s ban on love in Das Liebesverbot—the theme represents thegovernor’s antisensualist morality and almost amounts to a leitmotif—is treatedas a textbook case of motivic fragmentation in the course of the opera in an at-tempt to parody this “German erudition.”32

This preference for Italian bel canto opera and French opéra comique contin-ued to leave its mark on Wagner’s writings throughout the next four years. In“Dramatic Singing” (1837), for example, we read: “Why should we Germans notopenly and freely admit that the Italian has the advantage over us in singing, theFrenchman in terms of his lighter and livelier treatment of operatic music?” (SS12:15). And in “Bellini: A Word in Season,” Wagner demands “Song, song, andonce again song, you Germans!” Just how far he was capable of going in his en-thusiasm for Bellini emerges from his remark that “in Norma, which is undoubt-edly Bellini’s most successful work, even the poem soars up to the tragic heightsof the ancient Greeks” (SS 12:20–21).

Wagner’s enthusiasm for Bellini stemmed, as we know, from WilhelmineSchröder-Devrient’s performance as Romeo in a production of I Capuleti e iMontecchi in Leipzig during the early months of 1834. It was one of the seminalexperiences of his youth, and one to which he repeatedly returned even at the endof his life. On 23 March 1878, for example, he told Cosima that he thought the“rapture” of the second act of Tristan und Isolde was due entirely to Schröder-Devrient’s performance in 1834. Throughout the mid-thirties Wagner’s imagina-tion as a music dramatist was fired above all by Bellini and also, of course, byAuber, especially the latter’s La muette de Portici.

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When Wagner superintended a collected edition of his writings toward the endof his life, he refused to include in it not only the texts of his pre-Rienzi operas butalso the newspaper articles that he wrote before 1840. Yet it would be wrong toconclude from this that this refusal went hand in hand with a rejection of Frenchand Italian opera. For French opera in particular—especially the works of Méhul,Boieldieu, Auber, and Halévy, whose grand opera La juive (The jewess) was, inhis view, in the best tradition of French opera—he retained a remarkably highopinion that found expression in often surprising ways in his conversations withCosima, so that Nietzsche’s oft-repeated remark that Wagner’s place was not re-ally among the Germans but in Paris makes sense against the background of theabiding fascination French opera exerted on him.33

“We must seize our chance and honestly seek to cultivate the age’s new forms,and he will be its master who writes in neither an Italian nor a French—nor even in a German—style” (SS 12:4). With these words Wagner concludes his essay“German Opera,” repeating a demand that was typical of those made by the mem-bers of the anti-establishment Young German movement, most notably in Laube’snovel Das junge Europa (Young Europe, 1833) and in various articles that appearedin Laube’s Zeitung für die elegante Welt, in which Wagner too published some of hisearly articles. The Young Germans inveighed against obscurantism, reactionarychurch orthodoxy, ossified puritanical morality, and the recidivist policies of Germany’s particularist states, at the same time championing the rebellions and rev-olutions of recent years, whether in the form of the Greek War of Independence, theJuly Revolution in Paris, or the Polish Uprising. They demanded that the artist play anactive role in contemporary events and, rather than falling back on a mythical past,portray the realities of the present day. They praised a life of sensual beauty freedfrom the trammels of all conventions. And they espoused the Utopia of universal pol-itics transcending all national boundaries. These were all ideas that Wagner, too,shared, just as he shared the general enthusiasm for Laube’s literary model, WilhelmHeinse’s 1787 novel, Ardinghello und die glückseeligen Inseln (Ardinghello and theblessed isles). For the writers of the Young German movement, the eponymous heroof Heinse’s novel embodied their ideal of hedonistic sensuality and free love. At theend of the novel, this ideal is finally realized on the Utopian Blessed Isles of thework’s title, a propertyless state in the Aegean where each individual is allowed toexpress his or her individuality in whatever ways he or she chooses.

Wagner, too, read Heinse’s novel, and, such was his enthusiasm, he retained alively memory of it for the rest of his life, returning to it a week before his deathin February 1883 in the context of ownership: “It’s this that I liked so much aboutHeinse’s ‘Blessed Isles’—the people there owned no property, in order to avoidthe many miseries bound up with it” (CT, 5 February 1883). One of the moststriking aspects of Wagner’s intellectual development is that, however much hemay later have tried to deny them on ideological grounds, he was never entirelysuccessful in breaking free from earlier enthusiasms, a characteristic that is pal-pably plain from virtually every page of Cosima Wagner’s diaries.

Looking back on the 1830s from the vantage point of the 1860s, Wagner recalledthe “exuberant Young German mood” of those years (ML 90), a mood to which he

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abandoned himself wholeheartedly and that found immediate artistic expression inhis self-styled “grand comic opera” Das Liebesverbot oder Die Novize von Palermo(The ban on love, or The novice of Palermo, WWV 38).34 The work was finished inMarch 1836 and given its first—and only—performance under Wagner’s own di-rection in pitiful provincial circumstances at the end of that month. Wagner’sgraphic account of the performance in his autobiography makes particularly enter-taining reading. In his article “Pasticcio,” he had spoken of the need “to seize truewarm life as it is” (SS 12:10–11); and this is the goal that he set himself in his “car-nival opera,” a free adaptation of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure “but with thedifference”—Wagner explained in his “Autobiographical Sketch”—that “I elimi-nated its serious elements and in that way remodeled it in the true spirit of YoungEurope: free and open sensuality triumphed over puritanical hypocrisy simply bybeing itself ” (SS 1:10).35

The action was shifted from Shakespeare’s unhistorical Vienna to Palermo, andthe governor Friedrich, who takes over the affairs of state in the absence of the king(rather than the Duke in Measure for Measure), is turned into a priggish Germanwho, with his fanatical hatred of sexual love, embodies all the typically Germanvices against which the Young Germans fulminated. Wagner would have had aneven more compelling reason than Shakespeare to locate the action in Vienna, ex-cept that—as Egon Voss has pointed out—the work would then inevitably havebeen regarded as a “critique of the reactionary and repressive policies of Metter-nich’s regime,” with Friedrich identified with Metternich himself. Wagner’s deci-sion to transfer the action to Sicily was thus, in part, an attempt to sidestep thecensor.36

The ban on love imposed by the Teutonic moralist is ultimately subverted bythe Mediterranean sensuality of the Sicilian population. Indeed, “love’s antipode,”as he is described in the libretto (SS 11:97), falls under the spell of love, consumedas he is by his passionate feelings for Isabella. These feelings undermine his entiremoral system: “Wretch! What has happened to the system that you so carefullyarranged?” (SS 11:106). In Friedrich’s self-accusation in act 2, we hear a remark-able pre-echo of the sufferings of another character who, hostile to love, suddenlyfalls victim to an erotic passion with catastrophic results; as a sign of his trans-gression, he is struck down by the same spear with which he had set out to destroyan infamous hotbed of passion—the magic garden created by yet another enemyof love, Klingsor, who had even gone so far as to castrate himself in an attempt toovercome sexual desire. In spite of—or precisely because of—the differences be-tween the two situations, there is a striking parallel between Wagner’s “youthfultransgression” (as he described Das Liebesverbot when donating the score toLudwig II at Christmas 1866) and Parsifal (which he famously called his“farewell to the world”).

The first modern production of Das Liebesverbot since its disastrous premierein 1836 took place at Munich’s Nationaltheater on 24 March 1923, when the con-ductor was Robert Heger. “This early Wagner,” wrote Alfred Einstein on that oc-casion, “seems to be a slap in the face for his later self; to judge by its aim, DasLiebesverbot is the very antithesis of Parsifal.”37 Yet there is also a remarkable

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dialectic link between these two antithetical works: the governor Friedrich is notonly the hypocritical representative of a duplicitous morality, enjoying the verything that he denies others, he experiences the power of sexual love as a demonicconstraint that renders him unconscious of his actions (“I am not conscious ofmyself,” he says at one point in the opera; SS 11:84), so that, almost like Kundry,he desires sexual congress as much as he longs for “salvation” (SS 11:106). Heredesire is depicted as a form of perverse salvation, as “God and hell” in one (SS11:107). As such, it already looks forward to the ultimate paradox of Parsifal’swords to Kundry: “In höchsten Heiles heißer Sucht / nach der Verdammniß Quellzu schmachten” [To pine for the source of all damnation in ardent yearning forsupreme salvation] (GS 10:361).

When Friedrich promises to spare the life of Isabella’s brother, Claudio, in re-turn for her love, while in reality giving orders for his execution to be brought for-ward, it is impossible not to be reminded of Scarpia and Tosca. Yet the superficialparallel cannot conceal a more deep-seated difference between the two relation-ships. “Claudio, you’ll die—I’ll follow you!” Friedrich decides (SS 11:107); thelaw may not yield to passion, so that he is prepared to sacrifice himself to it andcondemn himself to death. “Death and lust await me” (SS 11:107). First he willcouple with Isabella, then have himself put to death.

This view of erotic love as a compulsive force that dooms the lover to death al-ready contains within it a number of aspects of the erotic longing familiar fromWagner’s later works. In much the same way, the idea of a ban on love itself re-curs in manifold variations, not only in Die Bergwerke zu Falun (WWV 67),where human love is banned in the name of art (symbolized by the paradis artifi-ciel of the Mountain Queen), but also in Tannhäuser, where earthly love is pro-scribed in favor of its heavenly counterpart; in the Ring, where love is abjured infavor of power; in the unrealized project for Die Sieger (The victors, WWV 89);and in Parsifal, with its rejection of erotic love, which is seen as an expression ofthe “will” that causes pain and suffering.

The ban on love imposed by the governor of Sicily involves other elements thatgo far beyond questions of individual psychology, even though they remainclosely associated with such questions. Friedrich is no “loyal servant of his mas-ter,” to quote the title of Grillparzer’s tragedy on a not dissimilar subject, but aman who out-Herods Herod. Although the populace accepts the absent king’sreign as a matter of course, Friedrich turns it into a form of gloomy, misanthropicdespotism. Needless to say, the populace sees straight through him and realizesthat the ascetic lifestyle that he tries to impose on them is not God’s but theDevil’s, precisely because his interest in morality is not an end in itself but ameans to the end of power. When he tells the townspeople that he intends to handthem over “to the king pure and undefiled,” they mutter among themselves: “Howunctuously the man speaks, the Devil must have got into him” (SS 11:81). Theman who tries to create a world of pure virtue and yet refuses to accept that taresare bound to grow with the wheat will produce not heaven on earth but only hell.(In this context it is enough to recall the character of Robespierre in Büchner’sDantons Tod.)

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Although Friedrich regards himself only as the king’s temporary replacementand as subordinate to the inviolable law, he is nonetheless a self-seeking careeristjust like Goethe’s Clavigo, on whose career his own is evidently modeled. Just asClavigo has abandoned his mistress, Marie Beaumarchais, so Friedrich repudi-ated his wife, Mariana, as soon as he began to climb the ladder of success.

[D]och er, der arm und unbekanntSizilien einst betrat,gewann des Königs Gunst, und stieg so hoch,daß er, von Ehrgeiz nur entflammt,der Liebe stilles Glück verschmäh’te,und mich, die Gattin, bald verließ!

(SS 11:68)

[But he who once, unknown and poor,Set foot on SicilyWon his monarch’s favor and rose so high that,Fired by ambition alone,He scorned love’s silent happinessAnd soon forsook me, who was then his wife.]

Unlike Clavigo, Friedrich had never really loved his wife, as he himself admits:“I’ve never loved—Mariana learned this for herself when, cold and faithless, Iabandoned her” (SS 11:106). In Friedrich, the instinctive desire for power over-rides all other considerations, including even love.

It is no exaggeration to claim that here there is already a trace of the oppositionbetween power and love that constitutes one of the main themes of the Ring, evenif in Das Liebesverbot the contrast is still colored by the ideas of the Young Germanmovement. Here the power of erotic desire implies freedom in a moral and polit-ical sense, whereas puritanism is equated with reactionary despotism. After all, ithas always been in the interests of authoritarian regimes to maintain a sense of“morality,” a point on which we are once again reminded of the Ring, in whichlove figures as a seditious force, rebelling against custom and ossified laws. (InOpera and Drama, Wagner describes it as an “agitator”; GS 4:56.) Such love isrepresented above all by the Wälsungs, and, significantly, it is decried by Fricka,who upholds moral “custom” and who regards the “despotic nature” of love (GS4:56) as a disruptive force, undermining the social and moral order to which sheclings unwaveringly and legalistically. “Stets Gewohntes / nur magst du versteh’n,”Wotan complains in Die Walküre [You understand only what you’ve always beenused to] (GS 6:31).

Friedrich, too, clings to the “law,” using it to combat “passion” (SS 11:107),against which he discharges the law like some fatal arrow at the very momentwhen he himself falls prey to desire. His attempts to enhance his own power andadvance his career are inextricably bound up with reactionary and despotic lawsand a morality that is hostile to both life and love. Wagner is implacable in expos-ing his hypocrisy, tempting one to recall Nietzsche’s ploy of opening his reader’s

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eyes by exposing and laying bare “ascetic ideals,” especially in Parsifal. (“Whatdoes it mean,” he asks in On the Genealogy of Morals, “when an artist like RichardWagner pays homage to chastity in old age?”)38

Remarkably, then, Wagner’s “youthful transgression” already anticipates thecritical method that Nietzsche was to apply to the composer’s own “farewell tothe world.” Yet Wagner was to rescind Das Liebesverbot in 1866—a year after hisprose draft for Parsifal—and to do so, moreover, in the spirit of his final work. Inthe quatrain that he wrote for Ludwig II, when presenting him with the holographscore, he equated the earlier opera with Amfortas’s transgression while hopingthat he might be absolved by Parsifal/Ludwig:

Ich irrte einst, und möcht’ es nun verbüßen;Wie mach’ ich mich der Jugendsünde frei?Ihr Werk leg’ ich demüthig Dir zu Füßen,Daß Deine Gnade ihm Erlöser sei.39

[I once transgressed and now would fain atone;But how can I cast off this youthful sin?I humbly lay its work before your feet,That it may find redemption through your grace.]

Turning his back on the Young Germans’ glorification of erotic love, Wagner paidhomage to chastity even here.

In Das Lieberverbot, the ban on love is directed not only at free love but at allforms of sybaritic pleasure, chief of which is its institutionalized manifestation inthe form of the carnival: the anarchic expression of hedonistic pleasure is boundto be eyed with suspicion and regarded as dangerous by any despotic regime.Luzio’s Carnival Song, especially its last two lines, at least toys with the idea ofrebelling against family and moral values and, as such, with anarchy.

Jetzt gibt’s nicht Weib, noch Ehemann,tralalalalala!Es gibt nicht Vater und nicht Sohn,tralalalalala!Und wer das Glück ergreifen kann,la!Der trägt es im Triumph davon!La!—. . . . .

Wer sich nicht freut im Karneval,dem stoßt das Messer in die Brust!

(SS 11:111)

[There are no longer wives or husbands,Tralalalalala!No longer fathers and sons,Tralalalalala!

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And he who can grasp good fortune,La!Will carry it off in triumph!La!—. . . . .

If a man won’t take pleasure in the carnival,You should thrust your knives deep in his breast!]

Curiously enough, this Carnival Song was the first piece of Wagner’s operatic mu-sic to be published, appearing in 1837 as a supplement to the periodical Europa.40

Readers familiar with Goethe’s writings will recall his description of the Romancarnival in 1788. The carnival, Goethe explains, derives from the Saturnalia, whichwas celebrated in ancient Rome as a reminder of the golden age of Saturn and forits duration accorded Rome’s citizens the “privileges” of freedom and equality,which were believed to have existed in that mythical past: “The difference betweenhigh and low seems to be set aside for a moment; everyone draws closer to every-one else.” Often the excitement threatens to descend into physical violence, andGoethe, with a certain horror, observed the narrow dividing line between violenceand catastrophe in this “modern Saturnalia,” which he describes as a “festival ofuniversal license and unconstraint.” His final remark that “freedom and equalitycan be enjoyed only in the frenzy of madness”41 reminds us that the French Revo-lution was to break out only eighteen months later. (Franz Grillparzer’s short story“Der arme Spielmann” [The poor minstrel] likewise describes a Saturnalian cele-bration whose outward trappings remind the author of a revolutionary uprising.)

And it is as an uprising—a kind of love-driven revolution—that the carnival ismeant to be seen at the end of Das Liebesverbot. Here Wagner offers an impres-sive display of the art of ensemble writing, an art that he had acquired from hisknowledge of opéra comique. When Jean-Pierre Ponnelle staged this scene in his1983 production for the Munich Nationaltheater, he drew on his own intimateknowledge of French and Italian musical comedy and created such a virtuosostage picture that one was left wondering why so highly effective a work is rarelyseen in the opera house. As before, Wagner modeled his own account of the up-rising on Auber’s handling of crowd scenes in La muette de Portici. Claudio, whohad been condemned to death, is freed by the crowd, and the governor’s puritani-cal dictatorship is brought to an end. Friedrich, as we know, has privately decidedto have himself executed, and he now calls on the populace to carry this out:“Sentence me by my own law!” But they refuse: “No, the law is abolished! / Wemean to be more merciful than you!” (SS 11:123).

In short, the revolution does not destroy the despot but frees him from his owntyrannical law, and at the end he is even invited to lead the procession of masksthat sets off to meet the king on his return to Palermo. In A Communication to MyFriends, Wagner described this moment as follows: “Shakespeare resolved the resultant conflicts by means of the public return of the Duke, who had secretly ob-served events: his decision is a serious one, based as it is on the judge’s ‘measure

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for measure.’ I, on the other hand, brought about the denouement by means of arevolution” (GS 4:254). Here the populace genuinely triumphs, and the carnivalbecomes a celebration of a free community ruled by sexual desire. “Let’s hold athreefold carnival,” the opera concludes, “and may its pleasures never cease!” (SS11:124).

Even so, Wagner’s comment that he “brought about the denouement by meansof a revolution” is not to be taken entirely literally, as this is no real revolution.Not even the tyrannical Friedrich has a “knife thrust deep in his breast,” for allthat he “takes no pleasure in the carnival” (SS 11:111). A general wish to get mar-ried replaces the desire for political change. No Bastille is stormed. Instead therevelers announce their decision to tear down all the “houses of mourning,” andthe king, who had after all appointed Friedrich as his governor, is welcomedhome, for, as Luzio explains to Friedrich, “he prefers lively jests to your own sadlaws” (SS 11:124). At the end of the opera, the unpopular governor is unmasked,only for him to don another mask in the republican spirit of the carnival, where-upon a procession forms, with the reunited couple Friedrich and Mariana at itshead. As it sets off to meet the king to the sound of cannon shots, pealing bells,and a military march, the revolution gives way to a legally recognized monarchyenlivened by a spot of saturnalian revelry. The final stage direction in the librettoreads, significantly: “At the end a salvo of rifles” (SS 11:124).

There is no doubt that if Wagner sought to take the sting out of the idea of apopular uprising, it was not least because of the censor. Yet it would be wrong tolose sight of the fact that for all his revolutionary views, the older Wagner wasnever an antimonarchist. (The same is true of many leaders of the earliest phase ofthe French Revolution.) In his address to the Dresden Vaterlandsverein, “How DoRepublican Aspirations Stand in Relation to the Monarchy?” (1848), he was todemand that “the king should be the first and truest republican” (SS 12:225). Thisis an idea to which many revolutionaries subscribed, not only in 1789 but in 1848as well. Wagner never really abandoned the notion of a popular republican king,42

and it continued to leave its mark on the hopes that he placed in Ludwig II and onhis 1867–68 series of articles, “German Art and German Politics.” Even the orig-inal version of Siegfried’s Tod (Siegfried’s death, 1848) is influenced by this ideaof a republican ruler, an idea repudiated only a short time afterward, followingWagner’s disenchantment with the conduct of the German princes during and after the revolution of 1848–49. “Allvater! Herrlicher du! / Freue dich desfreiesten Helden!” [Father of the universe! Glorious god! Rejoice in the freest ofheroes] (GS 2:227) is how Brünnhilde had originally ended her peroration.

Although at first sight Die Feen seems to be closer in spirit to Wagner’s later“Romantic operas” than Das Liebesverbot, there are in fact more thematic pre-echoes of the great music dramas in this “youthful transgression,” for all that theyappear in unfamiliar surroundings. From a linguistic point of view, the text of DasLiebesverbot is—relatively speaking—the most carefully elaborated of Wagner’spre-1839 librettos, the commedia dell’arte scenes involving Brighella being someof the most inspired products of the composer’s comic muse. As he noted in

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A Communication to My Friends, Die Feen and Das Liebesverbot represented op-posing “trends.” The need to achieve a “balance” between them was his chief con-cern during his “subsequent development as an artist” (GS 4:256). In advancingthis view, he was conceding that the “sensuality” of Italian bel canto opera andFrench opéra comique was to a certain extent “preserved”—in the sense of theHegelian “aufgehoben”—in the music dramas of his maturity.

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